>>95% of the time, the fraudsters get off scot-free. Look at Dan Ariely: Caught red-handed faking data in Excel using the stupidest approach imaginable, and outed as a sex pest in the Epstein files. Duke is still giving him their full backing.
It’s easy to find fraud, but what’s the point if our institutions have rotten all the way through and don’t care, even when there’s a smoking gun?
Just throwing these out there for people looking for options: Check out Piefed for a Reddit-like, and lobste.rs for an HN-like.
The fediverse might not be booming with activity to the same degree as the big names, but there’s plenty out there and it has a pleasant small-forum vibe that went extinct on the bigger sites a long time ago.
the reminder of "theres a human there" is not "defending" the actions. its a call back to reality, because people on the internet take little things way too fucking seriously all the time.
and yes, this is a little thing. extremely tiny. i promise you'll forget about it in a few days whenever the next thing in the outrage cycle bubbles to the top of your feed/HN
I’m plenty calm. There’s just nothing to debate here: the blog post and repo are a conscious, deliberate, and egregious misrepresentation of fact.
I would absolutely say exactly the same things to the author’s face as I’m saying right now. I would never work for a company that condones this in a million years, as a matter of principle.
And you don't seem to understand how the conversation went. I was obviously talking about my first comment, to which they answered.
> Which comments do you see doing that? Exactly?
Interestingly, those that made me write my first message were removed. Not that it was because of my message obviously, which mostly got me downvotes :-).
But the next best one would be:
"public shaming is the next best thing. I sincerely hope links to this incident will haunt him every time someone googles his name forevermore"
(after implying that ideally they should lose their job for this)
This is a bit more than overselling a proof of concept. He made claims that were not correct, and presented some LLM generated code as point of pride. And not on his blog, but a company's website.
He's emblematic of the era we now live in. Vibe coded projects that the "developer" didn't learn anything from, posted using LLMs. People have zero shame, zero curiosity, zero desire in learning and understanding what they're working on.
Also it doesn't make sense to escalate an interaction by swearing at a person and simultaneously asking them to calm down.
> Also it doesn't make sense to escalate an interaction by swearing at a person and simultaneously asking them to calm down.
I found it fun :-).
I kindly ask to try to empathise with a random human being who is most certainly not used to be shamed publicly, and they tell me to check myself in the mirror.
In a real "engineering" role, this person would be stripped of their license for stamping "production grade" on a bunch of AI slop.
That doesn't exist in our trade, so yeah, public shaming is the next best thing. I sincerely hope links to this incident will haunt him every time someone googles his name forevermore.
There was a piece a little while back, most probably from Cory Doctorow, about how some humans have already become Reverse Centaurs:
Controlled by a machine and only there to put their names and reputations on the line when the machine messes up.
Maybe this applies more to a writer having to generate 20 articles per hour in some journalism sweatshop, pressured to push out anything that will catch the winds of SEO augmented news, but I would not discount the level of pressure that the author of the blog post was put under to produce something, anything...
Based on the published profile, I strongly suspect that this person is not paid that well at all. you are not looking at a FAANG kind of deal here most certainly.
So maybe spare one second of thought for that future where many many folks are just there to be burnt up in some cancellation machine whilst profit gets accumulated elsewhere...
As you say, it's pretty hard to say that the average quality of software engineering makes it deserve the word "engineering" at all. Most software is bad accross the board, and developers on average get pretty good salaries for... whatever they bring to the world.
Still I don't think that some random employee deserves to be harassed and publicly shamed for a bad blog post.
> In other industries this would be a gross ethical issue and potentially a legal one
Yes, but this is not another industry. Also in other industries, some say that "full self-driving is coming tomorrow" or "we can send millions of people to live on mars".
> public criticism for public fraudulence is "harassment", I guess? C'mon, man.
I never said "don't criticise". I have seen comments that I found very disrespectful early when this post started growing, and I tried to call for some empathy for the human being who made that mistake.
Speaking as the user you responded to in the first link: I’m sure you get flak from all corners, but I (and presumably many others like me) take zero issue with your philosophy or design goals for the site. I’m with you all the way when you say you don’t want to HN to turn into a current affairs site.
The problem IMO is the current sensitivity of the filtering. You said upstream that a high enough number of upvotes could outweigh flags — but that CECOT thread was one of the top 5-10 posts of the month despite having been taken down for many hours overnight. If that wasn’t a thread where the upvotes should be a strong enough signal to override the flags, I dunno what is.
We’re asking for subtle knob tuning, not revolution.
I run an OSRS market analysis/flipping site, and have been keeping an eye on the effects.
The short answer is that there hasn't been a ton of movement across the market at large, but since Saturday, bonds have been swinging up towards the all-time high they set last December. Can't say for certain that that movement is tied to VZ though.
People always say this like the tech industry wasn't culturally anti-copyright and pro-creative commons before. Those same people probably work at Meta and Anthropic, just like Google's book project which got them in trouble.
> People always say this like the tech industry wasn't culturally anti-copyright and pro-creative commons before.
I completely agree with that. The problem is that the current system is such that only billion dollar players can flout the rules, while everyone else is left in the dust.
Others already mentioned they lost their lawsuit. Should the fines have killed Anthropic? Would have been more fair and a less bad world?
Why not focus energy on being anti-aggressive copyright in general. These system won't ever be fair. It's just rent seeking enabled by the government and some people can afford the rent.
You’re talking past me for no real reason, mate. That’s precisely the point I’m making.
Young Carlos thinks it matters that Anthropic got sued when they can keep flouting the rules anyway, and I disagree: it’s not a fair system until we ditch the rent-seeking entirely.
They paid one of the largest settlements in world history. Should I guess that hackers are only satisfied with the public execution of the company leadership?
To pick a nit: Technically Anthropic didn't loose any lawsuit or pay any fine. They came to an agreement with the authors to pay them a $1,5 billion settlement.
Which was a lot of money per book.
Wasn't the Google project scanning physical books and not distributing them externally? That seems like a very different thing than torrenting or even downloading stuff uploaded by a third party.
Why the negativity? You can also as an individual do the same as Anthropic and get sued for billions. You have that option, don't let anybody hold you back!
Fair point, but I think the Pinkertons would be at my door within the hour if I started re-appropriating the art style of Studio Ghibli or Disney for commercial profit.
Exactly this. When I was in my best shape my deadlift and squat were in/on the way to 2.5-3x my body weight. You don’t want to fail that without a lot of help and safeties.
Note for the uninitiated: That figure is not even impressive or competitive with competition lifters. This is just “guy who put in the time and work” numbers.
Yeah I was doing fine for the usual people going to the gym. I’d be last in a competition. I’m neither on steroids or an elite natural athlete. My point isn’t to say I’m weak, only that I’m not unusual for someone who went to the gym 5x per week and had a personal trainer/coach.
Does his degrowth proposal not seem like the next best option if you believe Pandora’s box is open?
Your train of thought makes sense, but relies on the assumption that people and small groups wouldn’t keep tinkering at scale to do bad things even if we had a united world government trying to stop it.
Better to have systems in place to stop people stockpiling weapons, than not have it. Just because not all murders can be prevented doesn't mean we shouldn't have laws and systems in place to try to prevent as many as we can. The FBI and Interpol does all kinds of stuff, but when it comes to AI they are letting the horse leave the barn. In any case, I prefer to have systems that prevent all kinds of problems (e.g. blockchain-based smart contracts, yes I know LOL) than let them happen and try to clean up the mess after the fact.
In general, cleaning up a mess is easier when the mess isn't self-preserving and being grown at an exponential scale by swarms of agents running on dark compute.
>>95% of the time, the fraudsters get off scot-free. Look at Dan Ariely: Caught red-handed faking data in Excel using the stupidest approach imaginable, and outed as a sex pest in the Epstein files. Duke is still giving him their full backing.
It’s easy to find fraud, but what’s the point if our institutions have rotten all the way through and don’t care, even when there’s a smoking gun?
reply